What happens when the “new media” isn’t new enough?

Guest editor Kevin Overbury welcomes you to Behind the Spin Issue 13...

Just a year ago – certainly two – few PR professionals would have really known what was meant by the terms blogging or RSS feeds or podcasts. They might have prided themselves of knowing about “new media”, but by that they probably meant websites, or email, or for the really adventurous the ‘listen again’ options on the BBC website.

Now what we might call the “new new media” words are entering the industry’s consciousness. More and more PR professionals are recognizing that they need to learn, and learn quickly if they are to provide clients with a genuinely comprehensive service.

Indeed three conferences on blogging and new media hosted by Sunderland University attracted a large number of PR professionals eager to learn. This issue contains a series of articles about blogging, podcasting and citizen journalism and a host of other new ideas to bamboozle the technologically illiterate. They are written by the people who will be tomorrow’s mainstream PR practitioners – students and graduates to whom the new media is just part of the way life is.

One of them is a Sunderland University student, Stephen Davies who writes about starting his own PRrelated blog which attracts 20,000 page views a week. His blog is a remarkable success. But he is not alone.

Sadly, for many practitioners in today’s PR mainstream, new media will always be a wild environment that at best they can attempt as outsiders to explore. Even the Sunderland conference-goers who recognize the issue will still often at best be feeling their way gingerly ahead.

For many PR agencies and departments, the place they will look for that expertise and new media familiarity will be those just joining the profession. It means new joiners who make sure they know what they are talking about can steal a march on their elders (I won’t say “and betters”). It also means the institutions that run PR degree courses must also ensure they equip their students properly.

How much it will change the whole basis of PR is open to debate, the sort of debate that takes place in these pages. The basics of identifying our objectives, our publics and the messages we aim at them will remain – but just what those messages need to say, and the forums in which they need to say it, might be dramatically different in ten years time to what we are used to now.

Meanwhile, the industry is not even agreed yet on just what PR actually is – in fact on this blog there is a suggested new definition of public relations. Neither is the society we work in yet quite sure about PR degrees, and certainly media studies degrees. There are interesting thoughts in these pages about that, too – and some useful tips about job-hunting from those who have just done it.

Elsewhere, we look at providing PR for regulatory bodies, mixing the need for simplicity and accuracy with the complex needs of what these sometimes mystifying organizations actually do.

We look at this year’s Oscar-winning Hollywood films and find a commitment to seriousness and thoughtfulness that goes well beyond the average blockbuster. We look at the growing place of public relations in the success of charities, how we will soon be thinking about using sound in PR campaigns, and how a student project has helped raise the profile of a Yorkshire school.

A mature student talks about how hard it is to balance ironing and running a home with a university course, and we learn about a one-woman publicity campaign that involved living for months on the roof of a Derby bus station.

There’s a discussion about how we explain to people the risks they might face taking part in, for instance, a drugs trial and a plea for an end to our obsession with celebrity tittle-tattle.

This packed issue looks at how public relations is being done now, and where it might be heading in the future. We hope you enjoy it

Comments

[David Phillips]

Off they all go... firing from the hip. Its all WoM and needs a good quality white wine to really appreciate the niceties of 'New Media'.

OK... here is the grumpy old man stuff.

There is nothing new about blogs, wiki's, RSS and social media. It has all been around for years. The effects are well known. We have strategies for management that are published in the academic books. Most of the issues people think they face for the first time are available in case study form in books that go back to the turn of the century.

N30, on November 30, 1999, when protesters blocked delegates' entrance to WTO meetings in Seattle, USA, was a notable event because it was managed, co-ordinated and promoted using 'Social Media'.

The headlines shrieked for the heads of the perpetrators from every continent.

It was a great PR coop using social media. It changed the World Trade Organisation and its constituent members.

Of course, now 'New Media' is fashionable for Prs, the really great practitioners don't wear flowers, they wear pinstripes. They don't do blue smoke, they do champaign and above all else they 'do Social Media'. If you believe that...........

Some of the technologies have seen a little tweak in the intervening six years and there is a migration from Usenet to blogs, but most of 'New Media', and our experience of it, is no more than you would expect by way of evolution over five years.

If this is new and exciting – where has the PR industry been? Yup, you got it - they have all been to paintballing team building days to lever up their 'shoot from the hip' skills.

Of course, students now starting their first PR job have been readied for the REAL world with courses about Internet mediated PR. If not, what have the institutions that offer the imprimatur of 'recognised course' such as the DOE and CIPR been doing? They surely live in the REAL world and are quite beyond supping wine and paintballing.

Or do I see things through MUD coloured spectacles?

[thebizofknowledge]

I stumbled upon this site as I was in the process of doing some online research. You made many good points in this age of fast-paced media change.